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Primary health care and the Vietnamese community: a survey in Greenwich
Author(s) -
Lam Tom,
Green Judith
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
health and social care in the community
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.984
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1365-2524
pISSN - 0966-0410
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2524.1994.tb00177.x
Subject(s) - vietnamese , greenwich , disadvantaged , borough , medicine , refugee , health care , interpreter , family medicine , medicaid , nursing , political science , philosophy , linguistics , environmental science , pathology , computer science , soil science , law , programming language
It is more than a decade since Vietnamese refugees arrived in Britain in any considerable numbers, but there is evidence that they are still disadvantaged in terms of employment, housing and health. Although several studies were carried out by the various agencies concerned with Vietnamese refugees in the years immediately after 1980, the year with most admissions to Britain, there has been little recent research which addresses the health care needs of this community. This paper reports a survey of the primary health care needs of a sample of Vietnamese families living in the London Borough of Greenwich. Respondents were satisfied in general with health services they received but there were specific areas of dissatisfaction and concern. The majority of respondents needed an interpreter when visiting their general practitioner (GP) and lack of access to formal interpreters was a barrier to the use of many primary care services. An additional barrier to services such as ophthalmic care, which may not have been experienced before arrival in Britain, was lack of information. High immunization and GP registration rates suggest that Western primary care services were widely accepted. However, a third of the respondents used traditional practitioners and medicines not covered by the National Health Service (NHS).